Anactoria

Sing to me then, muse, if you remember – how grief for the burning clung to her, weighing her step as she fled the falling city.

What was her name?

Her name was Creusa.

Sing to me how Creusa's breath came ragged, the air thick with black smoke. How every inhalation scorched her throat. How her lungs and her legs screamed for her to stop, for her to give up.

Just ahead of her she saw her son Ascanius, clinging to father Aeneas' hand, half running and half being dragged faster than his small feet could manage.

Even carrying old Anchises on his back and all the gods of lost Troy as well, the pious son of Aphrodite ran more swiftly than any mortal.

And Creusa was mortal. And Creusa was not chosen by the gods.

And you remember her husband and his father and his son – and you have forgotten her.

So I'll sing her story.

Just ahead of her, she sees her family.

Anchises shouts for Aeneas to go faster. Creusa calls out for him to wait.

Aeneas does not wait and he does not look back.

Just ahead of her becomes some distance ahead of her becomes so far that she can no longer see them.

Nor can she hear them. The noise of her heart pounding in her ears drowns out the dying all around her.

Her family is gone.

Creusa keeps running. Her sandals slap against the paved street. She cannot match Aeneas' speed, but, still, perhaps - the ancient cypress shading the temple of Cybele - it's not far.

Creusa's foot catches on something, loose rubble, maybe. She manages not to fall but as she regains her balance she makes the mistake of looking down. She didn't trip over rubble. She tripped over a lifeless body, a woman, someone, surely, whom she once knew – but she can't recognize the face now, now that some blade has split skin and bone and broken it in half.

The bile comes up fast and Creusa barely turns away in time to avoid vomiting on the corpse.

The dead woman had dark hair and olive skin and she was young. She might have been one of Creusa's sisters. They might have sat together at their father's banquets. They might have laughed and danced together. She might have been Creusa.

Creusa stays there, dry heaving, for a time. For a long time. For too long.

Bronze, gleaming through the dark soot-filled air, drives her on again.

Creusa slips down a narrow alleyway. Her throat is raw and she's shaking.

The boulevards are taken and the roads are blocked. But she is a daughter of Priam. Troy, in prosperity and in flames, is her city. She knows the streets and she knows her destination. She'll travel by the backways. She'll reach the eastern gate and the temple and the cypress. Her family will be waiting for her there.

Her progress is slow. It is night and even though Ilium is lit by its own funeral pyre there's not enough light to navigate the alleys quickly. She's joined by other women and a few children, all attempting to escape the fall of the city. These fellow refugees say nothing. There's nothing to be said and none have the breath for it anyway. Long shadows of fire flicker across their faces.

In this stream of broken humanity, Creusa is neither the first nor the last and so when the Greeks fall on them, they don't see her duck down behind a few large earthen urns left out behind a shop. She kneels on the ground, folding herself nearly in half to fit into the dark crevice. There's shouting and screaming and a child tries to crawl into Creusa's hiding place and Creusa pushes the girl back into the alley because there's no room for her.

A bronze-clad Greek grabs the girl by her dark hair, lifts her up, and runs her through with his sword.

Three women fall on him then, clutching his arms and legs, gouging out his eyes with their fingers.

He screams.

They scream.

The soldier's compatriots join, slaughtering.

The dirt Creusa kneels in turns to reddish mud.

She stays unmoving in her hiding place until she can't hear shouting, can't hear screaming, can't hear anything but her own labored breaths.

When she finally comes crawling out from beneath the urns, the women and the children she'd been fleeing with are dead and their bodies lie intermingled with the corpses of the Greeks who killed them.

The air smells of burning flesh and voided bowels.

Her hands are covered. She's covered in an awful coat of blood and dirt.

Creusa stumbles over the bodies. They're so tightly packed she can't pick her way around them. Soft and slick with blood, they make for poor footing.

So she notices when she steps on something solid that doesn't give beneath her weight.

It's a bronze shield, still strapped to the arm of its dead owner. Though it's obscured by dirt and by gore, its design is still evident. From the center of the shield, the painted face of gorgonian Medusa stares up at her.

Creusa bends down and she strips the shield from the corpse and she straps it to her own arm.

She takes the dead man's sword as well.

She is a Trojan woman, not a Spartan, but if cursed Helen could wield a sword then so can she.

Alone, Creusa advances through the burning city. She sees neither Trojan nor Greek. The enemy have swept through this quarter and left it looted and empty and aflame.

On her arm, the shield is heavy but, surrounded by death and carnage, the weight is reassuring.

It is not a cloak and it is not gold but it is an aegis nonetheless, for it bears the visage of the youngest gorgon, beloved of Athene.

The Greeks tell of a woman made monstrous for defiling a temple.

Creusa is not Greek.

Medusa was a woman, once – this is true. A daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, she was a maiden priestess to grey-eyed Athene. And she loved her goddess. And her goddess loved her. And the envious sea saw their love and he desired it and he entered Athene's temple and he took her priestess against her will even as she clung to the holy altar.

And when the tide ebbed and when Medusa lay broken and alone on the cold stone floor beneath the statue of her goddess, thighs bruised and bloody, clinging to herself, whatever was left of herself – her goddess knelt beside her.

In the arms of her goddess, Medusa prayed.

Cradling her beloved, Athene answered.

Medusa's smooth skin became scales. Her bright eyes became dark slits. Her shining hair became serpents.

For years Medusa lived as a gorgon, free from the desires of men.

And across those years, her goddess never forgot her.

And when Medusa finally prayed for an end to her story, grey-eyed Athene sent Perseus for she could not bear to strike down her beloved herself.

And when Perseus departed with one piece of Athene's priestess, the goddess took the rest as her aegis and so Medusa became as Pallas, always with her.

This is the Medusa under whose sign Creusa walks the dying city.

This is the Medusa whose face is painted on the bronze shield that Creusa uses to bludgeon a Greek soldier to death.

They cross paths by accident.

He's drunk with wine and with revelry – just as the Trojans were so many hours before.

When he sees that Creusa is a woman, just a woman, he offers to be gentle so long as she cooperates.

She does not cooperate.

Creusa has spent ten years watching Helen spar with Paris and win, not for lack of Paris trying.

Creusa has spent ten years watching her brothers fight and die beneath the high walls of Troy.

She feigns acquiescence until the drunk Greek is close and then she strikes.

She stabs him in the chest with her sword.

She carries the talisman of Medusa but she is not Medusa.

It's much harder than everyone has made it look. His armor is sturdy enough that she barely pierces it and when she does there's something hard behind it – bone, maybe. It surprises him though, and it hurts him, and that gives Creusa the opportunity to strike again. Instead of trying to pull the sword free for another try, she lets go and she grabs the rim of her gorgonian shield with her free hand to direct it as she slams it into the Greek soldier's face.

His nose collapses.

He collapses.

Once he's on the ground, Creusa rips the shield free from her arm, seizes it in both hands, and brings its edge down again on his face, and again, and again, and again, and again, with every sick crunch her blood-slick fingers slipping along the edge of the shield.

He tries to hold out his hands, tries to stop her. He fails.

When she's done, he lies still. His head is crushed, a mess of crimson pulp and bone splinters.

She's breathing hard. Black smoke air into her lungs, black smoke air out again.

There's a dent in the bottom of the bronze shield in the spot she used to smash his skull.

Creusa straps the shield back to her arm. She tries but cannot free her sword form the Greek's body. She leaves the weapon and she soldiers onwards.

She is a daughter of Priam. Troy is her city.

No enemy, no Greek, no monster, no man will stop her from reaching the shaded temple and the ancient cypress and her family.

The high walls of Troy are in sight now, towering. Built by Apollo and Poseidon and Aeacus they have not been breached. Unlike the city of Ilus, they have not fallen. But the gleaming gates, bronze masterworks that took a hundred craftsmen ten years to forge – all the gates stand open.

Creusa passes through the eastern gate.

The gate is as tall as five men and ten could walk abreast beneath it.

Creusa passes through the eastern gate alone, dwarfed by the walls and by the arch she goes beneath and by the anguish of leaving her home.

Outside the city, she follows a shepherd's track that twists south. The track is hard-packed dirt sprinkled with small stones that find their way into her sandals. It hasn't rained in days and so far from the carnage there's no blood to soften the earth.

She hardly knows when she reaches the ancient temple to the forsaken mother, a grassy mound topped by a shady cypress.

The hill is steep and she bends down to climb it, crimson-stained hands leaving gore in her wake. When she reaches the apex of the mound where the great cypress stands taller than the walls of Troy, Creusa finally rests, alone. Her eyes are heavy. Her soul is heavy. She sleeps.

They come while she sleeps, the others. Women, children, men – those survivors who heard that pious Aeneas would lead them away to a new land across the sea.

But Aeneas is not there and Aeneas does not come.

When Creusa wakes, they all look to her.

Where is your husband, they ask.

And she answers: he is gone.

He did not look back.

She doesn't ask or order that they follow her. But when Creusa lifts up again her gorgonian shield and begins the slow walk down the hill the Trojans follow her.

She goes south and west. South away from the city. West towards the coast.

All the land around Troy is dead, dead for ten years. Plundered and looted and burned and made to wasteland. Even the distant slopes of Mount Ida have not escaped the conqueror's ruin.

The survivors march along the roads away from the lost city through air still thick with the smoke of their home. The gods have not yet granted a rain to wash away the devastation. As they travel their numbers thin. Not everyone has strength to continue.

Creusa has strength. She draws it not from hope or from fate or from anger but from grief.

She continues because she can no longer conceive of how to stop – and if she stops, who will mourn the shades of her family?

The deserted village that they find has only a few small fishing boats remaining, tucked away some distance from the shore. They wait two days for favorable winds to blow and then Creusa and the others drag the tiny vessels down to the water where they bob dangerously. These are not the thousand warships that brought the Greeks to the Troad and these are not the mighty vessels that the wine dark sea will conspire with grey-eyed Athene to wreck as retribution for Cassandra.

The survivors of lost Troy pack into these fishing boats and the boats tilt and roll at every wave.

Creusa clings, white-knuckled, to the side of the craft with one hand while she adjusts the sail with her other. Her shield sits at the bottom of the vessel. Salt water laps over the sides and dissolves the grime from its face. Medusa stares up towards the vault of the heavens.

The journey takes three days.

They pass captured Tenedos, harbor of the Greeks.

They pass forgotten Kolonai, kingdom of ten years dead Cycnus.

At night they go to land and they sleep, hungry, beneath the stars.

And on the third day they reach the harbor of Methymna.

Creusa, surrounded by the other children of Troy goes to the palace of Macareus, son of radiant Helios.

They ask for peace and for land and Macareus, who was once a friend to Priam and who lost two sons to the Greeks, gives with an open hand. He dresses the Trojans. He feeds them. He leads them to the west where the farms burned by Achilles have lain fallow for want of men to plough them and he gives the Trojans tools and seed and friendship.

Royal Creusa does not build herself a hall. She builds herself a house – a small house of brick and of timber. Around her the other Trojans raise up dwellings of their own, ringing hers, and together they till and they sow and they harvest.

In her seat Creusa gives no laws and assigns no labors. She speaks when her voice is needed but otherwise she does not guide, does not lead.

When the sons of Macareus call upon her, she gives them their due and nothing more.

She is a widow and she is weary.

She hangs her shield above her bed, the face of Medusa staring out, watching.

Years pass.

Her dark hair fades to silver and age saps her strength.

When Hecate comes to return her to her family, Creusa has been waiting a long time to go home.

The remaining children of Troy mourn her passing. They tear their hair and they beat their breasts and they carry her body to a queenly tomb. Among the grave goods, they lay her shield over her.

And, then,

In the fullness of time,

As the world turns,

They forget.